Guest curators Caroline Casey and Sophie Friedman-Pappas have combined forces to create an exhibition formed from the Cavin-Morris Gallery roster of artists: Body Lines is a group exhibition featuring an international selection of artists, each with a transformative vision of the human body and spirit. The long history of drawing the figure has created an inextricable link between line and the body, a practice which continues to reflect our ever evolving relationship with the human form and consciousness. The drawings in the exhibition use line to push beyond representational depictions of physicality into the realm of abstract notions of presence and spirit. The exhibition will include the work of Dwight Mackintosh from Creative Growth, whose loose, repetitive lines result in x-ray like visions, as if to show the interior structures of the human form. Also from Creative Growth, the prolific artist Donald Mitchell uses obsessive crosshatching to reveal faces and figures within the surface of the page. Caroline Demangel also works in the practice of uncovering the intangible with her dynamic and energetic lines. She once described her work as “the hatching of something buried I am still exploring.”

The intricate and anatomical work of Luboš Plný speaks to the relationship between the internal and the external, his annotations ask us to think about the micro worlds churning inside all of us. Plný was diagnosed with schizophrenia simplex, a non-hallucinatory manifestation of the disease, and processes his condition by creating complex and layered images of the body.

Working to explore the depths of the spirit is Japanese artist M’onma who is guided by an ‘entity’ to create elaborate drawings that result in a woven, tapestry-like vision. He outlines intersecting swatches of space and color to form a tooth, fingernail or an eye, and ultimately carves out a world on paper. Belgian artist Solange Knopf also taps into the psyche to transmute archetypes and transmit dreamscapes of the soul. Additionally, Indonesian artist Angkasapura’s ferocious marks create an esoteric gravity within his heavy figures and their habitats. It is the varying density he gives each appendage and the intense detail that gives the viewer a clue into the force that moves him.

The exhibition will also include pieces by Miguel Ramon Morales Diaz and Ilya Natarevich who transform the ostensibly mundane to communicate a rich interior vision. The work of self-taught masters Bill Traylor and Martin Ramirez will be included in the exhibition. Both artists use seemingly simplistic, flattened representations of the human form with recurring motifs to explore a vivid yet complex world. Each artist harnesses the quality of line to convey the ever evolving vision of the body in relation to the external world. The selection for the exhibition explores the continuous dialogue between inward and outward selfhood.